A Hypocritical Wretch
The cup of tea Wangyu had poured for Zheng Nanlou was called Nightbloom Sleet.
The liquor was pale in color, but the fragrance was thick.
At the first breath it was as mild as a stretch of early spring sun falling on hard, cold frost and snow; then, on the curling heat, a rich, unctuous perfume spread outward, like the scent an epiphyllum gives off when it opens at midnight, threaded through with a damp bitterness, refreshing to the heart and at the same time carrying something that beguiled.
But that was not all Zheng Nanlou could smell.
Beneath that lush, gentle fragrance, it was plainly cold.
A bone-paring cold, like the ten-thousand-year chill welling up out of a crevasse in a snow mountain, the sharp ice crystals it carried scraping through his nose, mixed with a thread of rusty, bloody sweetness.
Exactly the same as the smell that hung about Wangyu.
It made him sick.
The moment Wangyu left, Zheng Nanlou caught that thread of tea fragrance again with no warning, and the nausea beat at his throat wave upon wave like a tide, his stomach turning over rivers and seas.
In the end he could not force it down.
But he had long since given up grain, and there was nothing in him to bring up but a little sour water, so he could only bow his head and retch over and over, hard enough that it seemed he might heave up his whole insides.
At last he could only put out a trembling hand, meaning to push that teacup and the misery it caused him further away.
But the tears the retching had gathered in his eyes without his knowing blurred his sight, and before he noticed he had knocked the cup over. It rolled twice across the table with a rattle, then fell to the floor with a “crack.”
The green jade porcelain burst apart at once, countless shards large and small scattering, and the tea inside splashed out along with them.
Zheng Nanlou was still retching, but his reaction was quick. As though he had seen a flood or a wild beast, he shot up from the cushioned stool and backed away several steps in a row, only barely escaping the drops that came flying at him.
He knew, of course, that this was no ordinary tea; once it got onto him, the smell would not fade for ten days or half a month.
He had no wish to put up with that nausea day after day.
With the cup broken and the tea spilled across the floor, the smell was thicker than before.
Naturally Zheng Nanlou could not stay. He did not clear it up either, but left the mess where it lay, frowned, turned his head and walked out.
His steps were quick, as though something were chasing him.
With his departure, the main hall returned to its usual solitude.
The mist-like gauze drifted and swayed in the breeze blowing in from outside, and on the corner of the table it half concealed there still sat a small white porcelain jar.
Sunlight came through the gaps in the layered branches and leaves, breaking into patches of light of varying depth that fell across Zheng Nanlou’s old robe, looking for all the world like an embroidered pattern made to suit it.
He was not wearing white today. He had gone to the trouble of digging out of his cabinet a blue-green garment he used to wear before he entered the sect.
His build had not changed much these last few years, and it only pulled a little tight across the shoulders.
But the clothes had sat in the cabinet so long that they had taken on that cold fragrance the other garments carried of themselves, which always left him feeling ill at ease.
He lay along the highest branch in the woods on the shaded side of the Hidden Snow Sect’s main peak, hands pillowed behind his head, loose strands of hair caught in the rough grain of the bark and pulling hard enough to hurt, though he paid it no mind.
When the wind moved through the wood a few leaves brushed his lashes, bringing a smell of leaf sap mingled with earth, and for a hazy moment it made him think of his old days in Huaizhou.
Back then he had liked to lie up in the branches like this too, staring at the sky and thinking of nothing, sometimes not even knowing himself what was on his mind.
It hardly seemed different from now.
There truly was no difference. To him the Hidden Snow Sect was nothing more than another Huaizhou.
The next gust of wind carried something else with it and broke the quiet that made a person go idle without noticing.
Zheng Nanlou turned his head. Through the thick branches and leaves the first thing he saw was a suit of black; as its wearer walked, the dark gold thread embroidered at collar and cuffs turned the light this way and that, like the edge of temper he could never quite keep down.
Higher up was a face he had seen only the day before.
Xie Heng.
On the platform he had cut a very imposing figure indeed.
A pair of slightly upturned phoenix eyes had looked over with the brows raised, violence spilling out of the gaze, and the tips of the canines that showed and hid behind his thin lips were like the fangs a beast bares on purpose, as though he wanted nothing more than to bite Zheng Nanlou dead on the spot in the next breath.
But looking at him now, he was only a boyish youth who did not seem very old, with the unruly temper that comes of being pampered in a great and noble house; he had probably never come off worse in anything in his life, which was how he had turned out like this, doing as he pleased with no thought for consequences.
Zheng Nanlou laughed once, without a sound.
When he laughed his cheekbones lifted a little, and the soft, flowing lines of his face turned suddenly more angular; in place of his usual lowered brows and downcast eyes there came instead a touch of cool, thin interest.
All at once he raised a hand, a green leaf he had just idly plucked pinched between his fingertips.
The smile had not yet left his face before the leaf was away, riding the wind through the wood like a living thing, straight at Xie Heng below.
Xie Heng was alert enough. Though he had not spotted Zheng Nanlou, he heard the thin whistle of what sounded like a blade cutting the air and turned quickly to get out of its way.
But the moment he drew on his power he found his dantian and meridians utterly empty; the spiritual energy in his body seemed shackled by something, and he could not call up a scrap of it.
In the end he could only force himself two steps to the side, and the leaf flew past the side of his neck, leaving a dark red line behind.
He had no attention to spare for anything else. When he raised his eyes again, the tree shadows crowded thick around him and the leaves rustled; at a glance they seemed to have come alive, sealing off every way out around him.
He realized at once that he had walked into a formation someone had laid for him.
Xie Heng had not always been called Xie Heng.
Zheng Nanlou did not know his former name. He had only heard that the one he used now had been changed for Wangyu’s sake.
Heng: the jade that hangs at the top of a girdle pendant.
Blunt and deliberate, as though he were afraid people might not know who this son of the great Xie clan of Jiangzhou had come a thousand li to the Hidden Snow Sect for.
But, as anyone could have guessed, he had not gotten his wish.
The heirloom red jade he had brought as a discipleship gift was sent up to Yujing Peak and returned exactly as it had gone, the box never once opened, without so much as a trace of that man’s presence on it.
Wangyu had not even left him a polite excuse for the refusal.
In the end there was nothing else for it, and he took his vows under another elder of the Hidden Snow Sect.
So of course he found this “waste,” Zheng Nanlou, who seemed to have taken his place, offensive in every possible way. At the sect tournament the day before, he had meant to humiliate him.
And Zheng Nanlou had never had the kind of good temper that swallows things in silence.
Xie Heng’s cultivation counted among the best of the sect’s disciples, and the sight of all this did not fluster him; he only frowned at the lush green wood in front of him and called out:
“Who’s in here playing at ghosts and gods? If you’ve got the nerve, come out and give this young master a proper fight!”
But before the words were out of his mouth, everything changed.
The mountain wind roaring at his ears stopped short in that instant, as though something had pinched it off by force.
The whole wood sank abruptly into an eerie stillness. Even the faintest insect chirp and birdcall had vanished without a trace, a quiet that put a chill in the heart.
As the sound was stripped away, his five senses dulled with it, and even his breathing slowed without his meaning it to, as though some outside force were pressing it down.
He knew of course that the formation was the cause, and at once made a seal with his fingers, meaning to drive up his spiritual energy and break it by force.
Just then a hard wind blew straight into his face.
He raised his head and saw countless emerald leaves pouring down before him like a rainstorm, sweeping toward him across the whole sky.
They looked like ordinary leaves, but a closer look showed that the edge of every one was keen as a knife, throwing back a glint in the sunlight cold enough to chill the blood.
Xie Heng spun and dodged, one evasion after another, then abruptly found that the leaves seemed to be under deliberate control, clinging to him like his own shadow, and yet each of them only grazed his body with precision, leaving line after fine line of blood.
Cutting skin and flesh only, never anywhere vital.
Like a silent mockery.
The blood soaking through stained his black robes in patches dark and light, like a pattern embroidered onto them just for him.
The method was so familiar that Xie Heng could hardly fail to work out who was ambushing him here.
And yet he did not believe it. Or rather, he did not want to believe that man had such means at his disposal.
A worthless nobody, driving him to this.
What was more, yesterday on the platform the man had looked so honest and sincere in conceding, and today here he was, laying a trap.
A hypocritical wretch, just as he had thought!
His face went ashen and he clenched his teeth, refusing to say that name aloud, as though speaking those three syllables would be some tremendous disgrace, though who he was contesting with there was anyone’s guess.
As if, so long as he did not admit it, he had never walked into this wood today, and had never been thoroughly toyed with by the very same method he himself had used.
Unfortunately, the wounds on his body would remind him of all of it.
Watching that sorry sight from the tree to one side, Zheng Nanlou only found it funny.
These sons of great houses held face higher than heaven; even after capsizing in a ditch the way he had today, he would never breathe a word of it to anyone.
Zheng Nanlou had counted on exactly that, and meant to make Xie Heng swallow this bitter fruit without a sound.
Better still if, after this, he stopped coming around to bother him.
Thinking so, he clapped his hands and rose from the branch. Without troubling himself over what became of Xie Heng afterward, a few light touches of his feet carried him straight out of the wood and down onto the level ground not far off.
He looked up at the sun, reckoning whether there was still time enough for a trip down the mountain; he had to buy some herbs to dress those wounds of his.
Medicine at the foot of the mountain cost a little less than in the sect.
But the moment he turned his head, he saw someone in white standing on a rock not far away.
When those ash-grey eyes swept over him, Zheng Nanlou’s heart shook in spite of himself.
He hurriedly lowered his head, and found that between the man’s long fingers was pinched a single green leaf.